Cubies

For Francis Naumann, the occasion for reprinting a thousand copies of “The Cubies’ ABC” was the approach of the hundredth anniversary of the Armory Show, which opened in February of 1913. Naumann, a Dada scholar, is the proprietor of Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, on West Fifty-seventh Street, and “The Cubies’ ABC” is a contemporaneous attack on modern art in the form of an alphabet book. It was first published in 1913, and not again until now, and it concentrates on Cubism, which was seen that year for the first time in America at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the Armory at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street. The Armory Show included about a thousand paintings and sculptures, by artists such as Degas, Manet, Monet, van Gogh, and Cézanne, of which only a few were Cubist (those by Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, and Alexander Archipenko, mainly). These were displayed in a room that was known as the Chamber of Horrors.

“The Cubies’ ABC,” which is six inches by eight, was written by Mary Mills Lyall with her husband, Earl Harvey Lyall, an architect, who drew the pictures. It was their only book. An art magazine called The International Studio described it as “delightfully funny,” and as “heaping every sort of satirical abuse upon the Cubists.” It cost a dollar, and nobody knows how many copies were printed, but there are several in museums and private collections—one of them Naumann’s. The Cubies are three figures of uncertain sex. One is blue, one is mustard, and one is magenta, and they all have green hair. Earl Lyall created them using pyramids rather than cubes, maybe because they looked cuter that way. They have triangle mouths and red triangle eyes, and, frequently, the leering expressions of jack-o’-lanterns. They tend to scowl a lot, and seem to be willfully obtuse. Throughout the book, they moon over anything Cubist and scorn objectivity. The entry for “A” begins, “A is for Art in the Cubies’ domain / (Not the Art of the Ancients, brand-new are the Cubies) / Archipenko’s their guide, Anatomics their bane; / They’re the joy of the mad, the despair of the sane.”

Naumann is an authority on Duchamp—he curated “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York,” at the Whitney, in 1996—and the Armory Show was the first place where Duchamp exhibited his work in America. The entry for “D” refers to his painting “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a Cubist image of a woman as if in a view composed of consecutive frames. The entry begins, “D is for Duchamp, the Deep-Dyed Deceiver / Who, drawing accordeons, labels them stairs / With a lady that must have been done in a fever,—/ His model won’t see her, we trust, it would grieve her!”

“No question, it’s an attack on modern art,” Naumann said in his gallery, turning the pages of his original copy. “People in those days thought that they could stop modern art in its tracks.” He first saw the book about thirty years ago, in a specialty bookstore called Ex Libris, off Madison Avenue. He was then an art-history student, getting a Ph.D. at City University. “I would have loved to own it, but they were quick to say that it wasn’t for sale,” he said. Eventually, he found another copy at an art gallery.

Republishing “The Cubies’ ABC” was only one of Naumann’s ambitions for the anniversary of the Armory Show. What he really wanted was to revive the show on the original premises, which was done for its fiftieth anniversary. In 1995, he went to the Armory to ask about renting the building and was told that it was too early to make any arrangements. In 2007, he went back. The Armory was full of soldiers in camouflage. “You can’t rent the Armory, we’re at war,” he was told. The last time he tried, he was told that he could have the place only when the Army wasn’t using it for drills, and that he would have to leave instantly if the Army asked him to. He consoled himself with the thought that it would cost a fortune to control the temperature and the humidity of such an enormous building, and, unless he could, “no one would probably lend the paintings anyway.” Instead, this month, he will show at his gallery an homage to “Nude Descending a Staircase,” with works by thirty-three artists, including Yoko Ono, Sophie Matisse, and Joseph Kosuth. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.